Danish top visa-free entry to other countries

On 5 March 2009 The Economist carried a chart showing some countries ranked by how many other countries their citizens had travel visa free access to.

This index was compiled by Henley & Partners and their fuller listing is also available online. Denmark ranks number one while New Zealand ranks eighth equal with Singapore.

Common Values - Why Kiwis and Canucks get along so well?

The World Values Survey web site has an interesting Cultural Map of the World (see below) by Political Studies Professors Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel that organises countries by the values their people hold.


This seems to provide a partial explanation as to why I, as a New Zealander, feel more at home in Canada than England or even Australia and enjoy visiting Switzerland and Austria.

What would be fascinating to see is such a map done for the values held by people in individual states in the USA, particularly California and New York compared with the Mid West and Deep South.

I have seen a similar map graphing the relationship between trust and economic performance by Harrison and Huntington (2000) in "The Origin of Wealth" by Eric Beinhocker (Figure 18-1 on page 433 - also see previous post).

UK-New Zealand passenger travel by sea - avoiding sin?

Last year the Bishop of London, Richard Chartris, was reported in the Sunday Times on 23 July 2006, as part of the Church of England's "Shrinking the Footprint" campaign, to say that taking a holiday by air was a "symptom of sin". (Subsequently the Bishop was reported to have travelled to Wittenberg in Germany by train, no doubt using nuclear-generated electricity.) The attack on this view by Ryanair Chief Executive, Michael O'Leary, as reported in the Irish Independent on 27 July 2006, was particularly robust.

Concern about the environmental impact of international air transport on the rise, but the only alternative means of international passenger transport for remote countries like New Zealand, Australia and those in the South Pacific would be by sea. It is still possible, but not cheap, to travel between the UK and New Zealand by sea with container ships offering a limited number of berths to paying passengers (see, for example, UK firm The Cruise People), as well as a few cruise ships like the QE2 operating annual round-the-world cruises. Of course, modern ships also have an environmental impact.

It was during the 1960s that air travel effectively replaced travel by ocean passenger liner as the main means of long-distance international travel and with good reason. Few people can now afford the time (what economists would call an opportunity cost) to spend weeks at sea getting to somewhere that would only take hours by aircraft.

In the 1960s, in the pre-containerisation days, I recall in Dunedin with my step-grandfather, Haxton Matthews, going on board a Union Steam Ship Company freighter that took a few passengers and was still serving the New Zealand-India route. He had served in the Royal New Zealand Navy during the Second World War and was taking a short trip by sea up the New Zealand coast. More recently I flew with my late father in a light aircraft over the QE2 as she passed down the East Coast of Northland, New Zealand - she was a truely magnificent sight.

Travel health

This is my first posting for a while.

On Monday afternoon this week I returned from meetings in a rather cold Geneva, Switzerland. I started coughing in the taxi from the airport and things went rapidly downhill from there - I will spare readers the gory details. I simply note that have yet to make it into the office and suspect that I won't be competing with my dog Morgan in the annual Titahi Bay Canine Obedience Club ribbon trial tomorrow - my wife, Wendy, might take him though. The doctor concluded that I had managed to catch a good dose of influenza, probably on the flights over.

As I usually have an annual 'flu shot ahead of the Southern Hemisphere winter, have made sure that other vaccinations are up to date and carry a few basic medications with me, catching a virus is rather frustrating. This has got me looking at the fine print at the back of the itinerary prepared by the travel agent. They list two web sites that are worth looking at:

• The Travel Doctor
• World Health Organization

Both have a good range of health information for travellers.

Previous health problems while travelling have usually involved me catching heavy colds. Food poisoning caught in Samoa and Tonga has probably been the most serious for me but a full recovery was made relatively rapidly in both cases. Friends have not been so fortunate and I have heard some serious sagas involving tropical parasites.

This week I have also had the results back from a series of hearing tests. Suffice to say that they help explain why I have never really had a great appreciation of music, particularly of the modern pop kind!

So much for my individual health issues. On a wider scale, I am very conscious of what a devastating impact viruses can have on the community in general and the role that international air transport in particular can play in their spread. SARS and avian 'flu have provided us with warnings in recent years. A colleague of mine has spent much of the last two years involved in the transport aspects of contingency planning as New Zealand prepares for what many regard as inevitable pandemics.

Kiwis in the United Kingdom

The BBC has produced a cartogram of where the 57,916 New Zealanders that were living in the UK at the time of the 2001 census were located. It is no great surprise that almost half the Kiwis ended up in London.

This compares with around 215,000 Britons resident in New Zealand.